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Thomas Kaufmann, the leading European scholar of the Reformation,
argues that the main motivations behind the Reformation rest in
religion itself. The Reformation began far from Europe's
traditional political, economic, and cultural power centres, and
yet it threw the whole continent into turmoil. There has been
intense speculation over the last century focusing on the political
and social causes that lay at the root of this revolution. Thomas
Kaufmann, one of the world's leading experts on the Reformation,
sees the most important drivers for what happened in religion
itself. The reformers were principally concerned with the question
of salvation. It could all have ended with the pope's condemnation
of Luther and his teaching. But Luther believed the pope was
condemned to eternal damnation, and this was the root cause of the
great split to come. Hatred of the damned drove people to take up
arms, while countless numbers left their homes far behind and
carried the Reformation message to the furthest corners of the
earth in the hope of salvation. In The Saved and the Damned, Thomas
Kaufmann presents a dramatic overview of how Europe was transformed
by the seismic shock of the Reformation—and of how its
aftershocks reverberate right down to the present day.
This volume combines a number of approaches to the history of the
conflict between religions and cultures. Contributions from
history, art and legal history, as well as Judaistic studies deal
with new conceptual considerations on the history of perceptions in
the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period; above all
interpretations of non-European religions, of paganism in their own
European tradition, and how ecclesiastic law treated a
oenon-believersa in relation to the heretics. The second volume is
in preparation.
If there was one person who could be said to light the touch-paper
for the epochal transformation of European religion and culture
that we now call the Reformation, it was Martin Luther. And Luther
and his followers were to play a central role in the Protestant
world that was to emerge from the Reformation process, both in
Germany and the wider world. In all senses of the term, this
religious pioneer was a huge figure in European history. Yet there
is also the very uncomfortable but at the same time undeniable fact
that he was an anti-semite. Written by one of the world's leading
authorities on the Reformation, this is the vexed and sometimes
shocking story of Martin Luther's increasingly vitriolic attitude
towards the Jews over the course of his lifetime, set against the
backdrop of a world in religious turmoil. A final chapter then
reflects on the extent to which the legacy of Luther's
anti-semitism was to taint the Lutheran church over the following
centuries. Scheduled for publication on the five hundredth
anniversary of the Reformation's birth, in light of the subsequent
course of German history it is a tale both sobering and ominous in
equal measure.
Ulrich Bubenheimer rekonstruiert die dramatischen Vorgänge der
frühen Wittenberger Reformation auf breiter Quellenbasis und unter
Nutzung z.T. bisher unbekannter Quellen. Dabei arbeitet er heraus,
dass die vielfältigen Interaktionsprozesse zwischen den führenden
Wittenberger Theologen, den Institutionen der Stadt, des
Allerheiligenstiftes und der Universität in der Kernphase 1521/22
keineswegs chaotisch vonstattengingen, wie es eine an den Urteilen
Luthers orientierte Historiographie, die von "Aufruhr", "Unruhe"
und "Chaos" sprach, voraussetzte. Bubenheimer kann plausibel
machen, dass es berechtigt ist, die sogenannte "Wittenberger
Bewegung" als "Wittenberger Stadtreformation" zu rekonstruieren.
Dabei zeigt sich, dass die in den Personen Luthers, Karlstadts und
Müntzers repräsentierten Reformationstypen - der landesherrliche,
der gemeindereformatorisch-pazifistische und der
kommunalistisch-militante - in nuce bereits in den Diskussionen und
Aktionen der Jahre 1521/22 angelegt waren.
Der zweite Band mit Aufsätzen von Dorothea Wendebourg präsentiert
Forschungen aus ihren Jahren an der Theologischen Fakultät der
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Wegen seiner Bedeutung für die
Forschungsdiskussion wurde auch ein älterer Beitrag zur
Reformation aufgenommen. Kennzeichnend für die wissenschaftliche
Arbeit der Verfasserin ist die Weite des zeitlichen Horizonts von
der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart und die Breite der räumlichen
Erstreckung von Griechenland bis England. Im Mittelpunkt steht die
deutsche Kirchengeschichte, und zwar die Reformation mit ihren
Folgewirkungen, insbesondere was Kirche, Gottesdienst und
kirchliches Amt betrifft.
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